The decision of Sinn Féin TD Pearse Doherty and Socialist TD Joe Higgins not to sign the final report of the Oireachtas banking inquiry comes as no surprise. The two men were never likely to agree to the kind of report that was inevitably going to pull its punches due to the array of political and legal constraints facing the 11 members of the committee.
The fact that the report has been unable to “name and shame” individuals has naturally disappointed a lot of people but it does not invalidate its findings or indeed the entire process that underpinned it.
The problem is that too much was expected from the inquiry, given the constraints under which it had to operate, and the members of the committee themselves raised false expectations about what they could achieve.
Some committee members, and not just those who refused to sign, have appeared oblivious from the start that the Irish people decided in a referendum in 2011 not to give parliamentary committees the power to make adverse findings against individuals.
There is a lot of double
think about parliamentary inquiries. On the one hand there is a seemingly endless clamour for investigations into potential scandals but on the other the public has refused to trust politicians with the power to carry out the task.
There is no avoiding the fact that the banking inquiry was set up in the full knowledge of the limitations that would face its members when it came to writing their report. As well as legal constraints there was never much chance 11 politicians from a variety of party and ideological backgrounds would agree an analysis of what went wrong and why.
On the record
Despite their differences they all worked extremely hard and during the public and private sessions. Over the past year the committee chaired by Labour TD Ciarán Lynch heard 413 hours of testimony and received 42,000 documents about the State’s financial collapse. Almost all of the leading politicians, civil servants, regulators and bankers at the centre of the financial collapse gave testimony to the committee.
That process alone, in which the public for the first time heard detailed accounts of what had happened, probably justified the inquiry’s existence. All of the testimony given by former taoisigh Bertie Ahern and Brian Cowen as well as former Department of Finance chiefs Kevin Cardiff and David Doyle, among others, is now on the record and open to analysis.
Even if the inquiry’s conclusions fall far short of what the majority of its members would have liked that, of itself, does not invalidate the exercise and neither does the refusal of two members to sign the report.
Tight restrictions
The inquiry was established under the Houses of the Oireachtas (Inquiries, Privileges and Procedures) Act 2013, which places very tight restrictions on the type of findings the members can make. Anyone named in the draft report will have to be contacted and given a period, originally envisaged as two weeks, to respond.
The committee must publish its findings before the Dáil is dissolved ahead of the general election, and last week agreed to extend the publication date until January 27th.
Fianna Fáil TD Michael McGrath struck a realistic note on his way into the inquiry yesterday to consider 140 amendments to the draft report. He acknowledged it would be difficult to achieve agreement on its contents but addedthe committee was never likely to agree a lengthy document on a complex issue that all 11 members were completely happy with.
He summed up the majority mood when he said that if the committee failed to produce a report it would be letting people down. That is the pressure facing the nine members of the committee still struggling to reach agreement and salvage something from the process.
